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Kim
"Kim" is a 1982 essay by Rosemary Sutcliff published in the journal Children's Literature in Education no. 47 about the Rudyard Kipling novel of the same name, part of a series on rereading a childhood favourite. Its description of the novel reuses text from her 1960 monograph Rudyard Kipling, and continues its defense against allegations of jingoism levelled at Kipling. The essay was reprinted in the 1995 anthology Celebrating Children's Literature in Education, edited by Geoff Fox. Synopsis Sutcliff cannot remember when she was first read Rudyard Kipling's Kim by her mother, along with his Just So Stories, Jungle Books, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, but it retains a permanent place on her windowsill among her select favourites. The "picaresque and plotless" novel is on the surface level the story of a boy's training as a secret agent of the British Raj – the level captured by the lavish film adaptation which Sutcliff calls "a colourful and entertaining husk, with all the peculiar essence of Kipling's story drained out of it." It is also the story of a Quest, for Kim's true self and the Buddhist enlightenment of his beloved lama. Their quest takes them wandering through India at ground-level, in a vivid evocation of scene and setting characterized by Kipling's habitual depiction of light and what Sutcliff calls "a sense of crowding riches" behind the text, and which Kipling himself likened to an iceberg. When Sutcliff began to write herself, she noticed the similarities between Kim and Mowgli of the Jungle Books. ''Both are "citizens" of two worlds, by birth and adoption, and subject to a painful choice between the the two. Both have a supporting cast of "sponsors" in their adopted world: for Kim, there is the lama, whom calls "the only perfectly good character, I think, that I have ever met between the pages of a book, who contrives also to be perfectly attractive"; the cloistered but irrepressible dowager of Saharunpore; the horse dealer and spy Mahbub Ali, based on a Pathan friend of Kipling's; Lurgan Sahib, the curio dealer and spy, based on one Alexander Jacobs; and the cowardly lion of a clerk, the babu. As Western attitudes towards their empires changed over the twentieth century, Kipling's work came in for accusations of jingoism "by people who had not noticed that the accent of his work is on service, rather than mere mastery." Sutcliff has mixed mixed feelings about empire: like Kipling, also from a Service family, she can sympathise with the desire for independence, while also feeling impatient of armchair critics without direct experience. She quotes the Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri's praise of ''Kim as 'the finest story about India in English,' and emphasises Kipling's love of India, born from his youthful experiences exploring the country as a newspaper correspondent, and his view of its administration, formed from the acquaintance of its doctors, teachers, engineers, and officers rather than its rulers. He disliked narrow-minded styles of religion, Sutcliff notes, and in Kim wrote a saint who is Buddhist, not Christian – though even he does not reach his goal through the philosophy of non-attachment. She concludes, "Kim is a strange, beautiful book, written on many levels, and beneath the Secret Service adventure story, and below the spread of constantly changing scenes, curious incident and laughter, and the delights of smell and sound and colour, the raggle-taggle riches and the half-glimpsed glories, at the deepest level of all, it is a story that has to do with the Soul of Man; a story whose real theme is love." References By or about Kipling: * Just So Stories (1902) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Book The Jungle Books] (1894-5) * Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewards_and_Fairies Rewards and Fairies] (1910) * Kim(1950 film) * "The Ballad of East and West" (1889) * Criticism of Kim by Nirad C. Chaudhuri * Lahore Civil and Military Gazette * "Song to Mithras" Other favourite books of Sutcliff's: * Frances Hodgson Burnett – The Secret Garden (1911) * Kenneth Graham – The Wind in the Willows (1908) * Euripides – Hippolytus, translated by Gilbert Murray (1902) External links * Read Celebrating Children's Literature in Education on Internet Archive * "Kim" on Springer Link (paywall, one-page preview) See also * "Kipling for Children" Publication history # Children's Literature in Education vol. 13 no. 4, December 1982, pp. 164-170. # Celebrating Children's Literature in Education. Ed. Geoff Fox. New York : Teachers College Press, 1995. pp. 169-175. Category:Essays